Korean Winter by Griff Hosker

Author:Griff Hosker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sword Books Ltd.
Published: 2019-08-08T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

By Thanksgiving, we had made dramatic improvements to our new home. We had one of the houses as officers’ quarters, one for the NCOs and two for the enlisted men. Jake and I each had our own room. We had cobbled together some furniture so that we were quite comfy. We had brought the cots from our tents. The lack of windows did not matter as we had electricity and it meant we did not need to bother with blackout curtains. A bonus was that we had had mail from home and the chastened Lieutenant at Headquarters had sent us the Bren guns and money for food. We still ate most of our main meals at the base for we were not fools and the food was good but we enjoyed cooking our own lunches and breakfasts. We had proper bacon!

Each time we visited the base I asked Sergeant Houlihan about our transfer back to Commonwealth control. However, MacArthur’s advance meant that we were almost forgotten and we all became fitter as we ran twice a day and the newer men received more training from old hands like Sergeant Major Thorpe and Sergeant Grant. The Colonel had not been happy with our decision to decamp, as I discovered a week after we had made the move, but three weeks later he was too busy to worry about us due to the bad news from the north. The sleeping dragon had finally woken and China had sent over two hundred thousand men across the border to strike without warning the most advance units of the allied army. The 8th Cavalry was surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir and other elements were trapped behind enemy lines and a Dunkirk type evacuation looked like it would be needed soon in the northeast of the country. MacArthur’s gamble had failed. The Thanksgiving dinner was enjoyable for my men but there was a mood of doom and gloom amongst our hosts. Operation Home for Christmas seemed to stick in men’s throats. All the gains we had made were as quickly lost and the roads were clogged with units retreating towards the 38th Parallel and the original border.

I was aware that we would be needed again just as soon as someone remembered that there was a section of Commandos who could be used behind enemy lines. Even though winter had set in and we had to endure both rain and snow not to mention cold, I took the section out twice a day for two five-mile runs. In addition, we continued with our training. We were now a much stronger unit. The old hands had endured incarceration and it made them stronger somehow. We had a backbone of NCOs that would be the envy of any unit. We had kept the North Korean weapons we had taken and they were disassembled and then reassembled so that we knew how they worked; who knew when that skill might be needed. We replaced the mortar shells and prepared for the day when we would have to fight again.

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